(Vanillesauce)

　　Editor's note: The recipe and introductory text below are excerpted from Rick Rodgers's book Kaffeehaus: The Best Desserts from the Classic Cafés of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague. To read more about Austrian cooking, click here.

　　This recipe originally accompanied Farmer's Cheese and Raisin Filo Strudel.

　　A cousin to the French crème anglaise, this pale yellow dessert sauce is called Kanarienmilch, or "canary milk," in some old cookbooks. The Viennese version is boiled, as the egg yolks are protected from curdling by the cornstarch. This makes it a slightly thicker, less egg-rich sauce that beautifully offsets Austro-Hungarian desserts. Because it takes less watching, I now use Vanillesauce whenever I need a vanilla dessert sauce.

　　

Ingredients

Makes about 2 3/4 cups

　　2 tablespoons cornstarch

　　2 1/2 cups milk, divided

　　1/2 cup sugar

　　2 large egg yolks

　　1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise, or 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

　　

Step 1

1. Sprinkle the cornstarch over 1/2 cup of the milk in a small bowl and whisk to dissolve. Add the sugar and egg yolks and whisk well.

　　

Step 2

2. Bring the remaining 2 cups of the milk and the vanilla bean just to a simmer in a heavy-bottomed medium saucepan over low heat. Remove the bean, scrape the vanilla seeds into the milk, and discard the bean. Gradually whisk the egg yolk mixture into the milk.

　　

Step 3

3. Cook, whisking often, until the sauce comes to a full boil, about 3 minutes. If using vanilla extract, stir it in now. Strain through a wire sieve into a bowl. Serve warm.

　　

MAKE AHEAD

Step 4

The sauce can be prepared up to 1 day ahead, cooled, covered, and refrigerated. Reheat in the top part of a double boiler over simmering water.

　　From Kaffeehaus: The Best Desserts from the Classic Cafés of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague by Rick Rodgers ©2002, 2014 by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, a member of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. Buy the full book from Amazon or Bookshop.